Fahamu Bulletin Archive

Donate to Pambazuka News!

Follow Us

Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 2,600 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators who together produce insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative and influential web forums for social justice in Africa.

Latest titles from Pambazuka Press

African Sexualities

A ReaderSylvia Tamale
A groundbreaking book, accessible but scholarly, by African activists. It uses research, life stories and artistic expression to examine dominant and deviant sexualities, and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities and femininitiesBuy now

Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya

Horace Campbell
In this elegantly written and incisive account, scholar Horace Campbell investigates the political and economic crises of the early twenty-first century through the prism of NATO's intervention in Libya.Buy now

Queer African Reader

Edited by Sokari Ekine, Hakima Abbas A diverse collection of writing from across the continent exploring African LGBTI liberation: identity, tactics for activism, international solidarity, homophobia and global politics, religion and culture, and intersections with social justice movements.
A richness of voices, a multiplicity of discourses, a quiverful of arguments. African queers writing for each other, theorising ourselves, making our ...more
Buy now

China and Angola

A Marriage of Convenience?Edited by Marcus Power, Ana Alves
This book focuses on the increased co-operation between Angola and China and shows that although relations with China might have bolstered regime stability and boosted the international standing of the Angolan government, China is not regarded as a long term strategic partner.Buy now

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Walter Rodney
Rodney shows how the imperial countries of Europe, and subsequently the US, bear major responsibility for impoverishing Africa. They have been joined in this exploitation by agents or unwitting accomplices both in the North and in Africa.Buy now

Features

Dhiru Soni, Ahmed Shaikh, Anis Karodia and Joseph David

cc FLG The new wave of ‘looting’ of land and other natural resources will likely continue on a scale hitherto unknown. Whatever the supposed benefits of this trend, urgent attention ought to be turned to the thousands of people in Africa and other emerging nations who will become landless in the countries of their birth.

The legacy of Frantz Fanon

Hamza Hamouchene

cc TO Reading Fanon’s thought, one cannot help being absorbed and shaken by his truth and foresight on the bankruptcy and sterility of national bourgeoisies who have tended to replace colonialism with a new class-based system replicating the old colonial structures of exploitation and oppression.

Celebrating Adwa Victory as the significant African victory over World Empire

Mammo Muchie

cc YT Ethiopianism is at the heart of the quest for total African liberation and unity. This glorious early resistance should offer a powerful inspiration for the African people to confront current challenges that are more subtle and insidious than those faced during slavery and colonialism.

Otim Denis Barnabas

c c BFZ Post war northern Uganda has been economically and politically deprived leading to the exclusion of especially women in political processes. The inequity in access to resources and to positions of power between the sexes affects the structure of the country as a whole and must be corrected.

c c PAC The Pan African Congress was held 21 years after the previous one. Its resolutions capture the Congress’s desire to re-ignite the Pan African spirit, enthuse commitment to our African identity and inject energy into the Pan-African Movement.

George Mwai

c c SN It is very true that decades of organising in Africa have assumed, quite wrongly, that social problems are discrete challenges only facing specific groups – and that they should be tackled as such.

Patrick Bond

c c AR Can Africans with dot-connecting talents now more forcefully consider an eco-socialist model? We need to recover the socialist traditions of Fanon, Lumumba, Cabral, Rodney, Ruth First, Sankara and Chris Hani; and to these add environmentalist, feminist and other intersectional activisms. Or perish.

Issa G. Shivji

c c PZN NGOs and activists need to give themselves a really hard look. They cannot possibly be partners of, and stakeholders in, systems that oppress and dehumanize the large majority of people. They must choose the side of those who are struggling for a better world and against those who want to maintain the existing world. Neutrality is betrayal.

Sabatho Nyamsenda

c c PZN Neo-liberal NGOism and the consultancy culture, with their emphasis on policy – more “action,” little thought – and prescriptive prognosis, has taken a toll on our intellectual thinking, the result of which is that we have abdicated analyzing and understanding the world.

The neo- liberal framework and struggle of identities

Leila van Rinsum

c c NYDN LGBTIQ struggles are connected to universal struggles for liberation of people from the hegemony of the white-male capitalist world and its allies. But the oppressor – and even activists – have split this struggle and reduced it to a question of identity.

Ruth Nyambura and Wangui Kimari

c c CN NGOs do a good job, certainly, but they cannot escape the charge that often they are focused on professionalising “development” and people’s struggles through their constant supply of statistics, reports and case studies. Rarely do these organisations tackle entrenched structural injustices underpinning the problems they attempt to solve.

Horace G. Campbell

c c CP Another multinational military deployment in Libya is being suggested, following the spread of ISIS violence to parts of that country. But the world must not be railroaded into another UN-supported deployment of troops to back Western military and economic interests in Libya. There should be clear opposition to proxy wars in Libya and for the UN to expose and expel Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia from their mischief-making in Libya.

Relatives of Mandela, Kathrada, Sisulu, Dadoo, Naude, Chikane and other stalwarts speak out

c c SJP It is the Israeli Apartheid Week in South Africa. The children of celebrated liberation heroes have come out to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, denouncing the Jewish state’s brutal colonial occupation of Palestine. The campaign is supported by 85 South African organizations and institutions.

c c AU A coalition of 76 civil society organizations from within and outside Africa has written to the African Union seeking immediate publication of the report of the AU Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan (AUCISS), whose findings they believe will make a critical contribution to the the peace process in the war-torn nation.

Peter Kenworthy

c c AC A life-sentence in prison, torture and no medical treatment is the price Sidahmed Lemjayed and 22 of his fellow Saharawis have had to pay for fighting for independence and against the exploitation of resources in their homeland, Western Sahara.

Chief Charles A. Taku

c c WWG Debate about the quest for justice following the Rwandan genocide of 20 years ago continues. A former defence counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) adds his voice, responding especially to former Prosecution official Alex Odora-Obote’s defence of the Tribunal.

Evans Rubara

c c IPPTanzania’s general elections are set for October 2015 and the liberation party CCM that has ruled since independence already has 20 presidential aspirants. One of them is the young and ambitious January Makamba, whose announcement to stand for presidency has caused some excitement in the land. What chances does he have?

Douglas Schorr

c c IEC As the British Empire travelled around the globe, annexing land and enslaving people, bloodshed was always closely followed by cricket. It is for this reason that cricket has the power to bring people and nations together and it is for this reason that this legacy, left behind in the greedy and brutal pursuit of power and wealth, can be considered a gift. The Cricket World Cup is under way in Australia and New Zealand, 14 February - 28 March, 2015.

Could the Catholic Church's Ethnology Museum be holding artefacts with doubtful histories?

Kwame Opoku

c c PZ Churches supported the establishment of colonial regimes, especially through the destruction of societal, cultural and religious systems in Africa. Until today racist and ignorant assumptions about African cultures inform the justification of keeping artefacts that missionaries looted from Africa to create collections and museums in Europe.

Michelle Yaa Asantewa

c c TPT British colonial soldiers committed genocide in the Kingdom of Benin in 1897. They then looted some 4,000 pieces of art which have never been returned. A Nigerian film recreates the invasion, exposing the bestial brutality of Empire.

Five decades since his martyrdom the struggle continues by any means necessary

Abayomi Azikiwe

c c MX 50 years have passed since the shooting of Malcolm X, yet the institutionalized racism he fought against, as well as its resulting violence, poverty and inequality, still blight many African American communities in the US. It is time to revisit Malcolm X’s life, death, and legacy to find a way out.

Ajamu Nangwaya

c c AJ Internationalists who are in agreement with Malcolm X’s internationalism and global justice commitments ought to actively support the fight for self-determination, independence and development of the labouring classes in Haiti.

Building towards a new wave of Global South decolonial anti-imperialist resistance in Britain

Sukant Chandan

c c MX Inspired by the man himself, The Malcolm X Movement is a Black and Asian decolonial and anti-imperialist initiative launching in August 2015 in the UK, which is trying to develop unity among the peoples of the Global South in fighting all oppression.

Dan Glazebrook

c c TPT a
As Egyptian President Sisi calls for more support in the fight against NATO-funded militias in Libya, the West’s refusal to back him raises the question of their ultimate aims in entering the region. The West is complicity in enabling ISIS to gain a strong foothold and further destabilise Libya, Syria and, potentially, Egypt.

Alemayehu G. Mariam

c c EP Karuturi has nothing to show for his “investment”, except a humongous debt. Where are the tens of thousands of hectares of oil palm, sugar cane, rice, edible oils and maize and cotton he promised? Where are the 60,000 workers? They exist only in the warped imaginations of the corrupt state fat cats in Addis Ababa.

Hamza Hamouchene

c c GP A plan to power Europe from Saharan solar plants seems to have stalled, but several large North African solar projects are still going ahead despite local concerns. Hamza Hamouchene asks: where did the Desertec project go wrong, and can desert solar power yet play a role in a democratic and sustainable future?

Dhiru Soni and Mark Hay

c c TIA Despite the fact that apartheid officially ended in 1994 in South Africa, new forms of racism and elitism continue to linger on, grounded in enduring asymmetries of power. Such power relations continue to serve the interests of elites whilst marginalising millions of indigent people.

Motsoko Pheko

c c BBC The issue of land ownership in South Africa has been on the minds of millions of Africans for many decades, some with no place to bury their dead while being surrounded by luxurious golf courses and palatial hotels. This must change.

Odomaro Mubangizi

c c PZ In the quest for regional integration, it is helpful to look at some of the less known yet strategic locations such as Katuna for models of emulation and improvement. Katuna offers a model of integration from below.

c c IN A no-holds-barred debate, of the kind that one cannot hear inside Rwanda, erupted online this week. People expressed themselves freely about the ongoing campaign to remove presidential term limits from the constitution so that Paul Kagame can continue in power after 2017. The debate reveals that there is far more to Rwanda than the dictatorship allows the world to know via massive PR.